Copyright © 2010 I-COM International 2010-09-06T16:56:31+0100 2010-09-06T16:56:31+0100 http://www.i-com.net/blog/ Leading Manchester SEO, SEM and web design agency blog. http://www.i-com.net/blog/ http://i-com.net/images/icom-net.gif http://www.i-com.net/blog/ Leading Manchester SEO, SEM and web design agency blog. I-COM International blogmaster at i-com dot net I-COM International I-COM International en SEO, SEM, Web Design, Web Development 1440 http://www.i-com.net/blog/crains-best-places-to-work-2010-the-results-363/ Congratulations to Crain's, which yesterday put on a fantastic event at the Ramada Hotel Piccadilly. It was really well organised, and everyone from the I-COM team had a great time. Unfortunately I-COM, nominated in the 'Big' category, didn't win, but the fact that we reached the final is a hugely encouraging sign that we're doing something right! The nominations were based on answers to a survey provided by I-COM employees, coupled with answers to a questionnaire posed to directors about methods of rewarding employees, the working environment and work-life balance. I've published the list of winners below, which you can also see on the Crain's site, and wish to extend I-COM's congratulations to each of them:NEARLY BIG categoryWINNER: Adele Carr Financial Recruitment LtdRUNNERS-UP: JLES North West, Peppermint PRBIG categoryWINNER: Imerja LimitedRUNNERS-UP: The ReThink Group Plc, Code ComputerloveBIGGER categoryWINNER: The fresh GroupRUNNERS-UP: Leap29 Limited, JMC ITBIGGEST categoryWINNER: Barclays CorporateRUNNERS-UP: Ralli, The Hut Group  Well done to all the above, just be warned, I-COM is coming for you next year! I-COM News 2010-06-18 10:02:36 http://www.i-com.net/blog/crains-best-places-to-work-2010-the-results-363/ http://www.i-com.net/blog/seo-is-sexy-its-a-fact-341/ Following the startling news that Apple's iPhones and iPads actually make you more attractive to women, the SEO team at I-COM decided to conduct their own research into the unsupported but long held theory that a well SEO'd site actually makes male business owners more attractive to women. The iPhone study, conducted by respected independent scientific think tank Phones 4U, suggested that women actually found men with iPhones to be "more reliable" and, according to one teacher, "very good at his job." So the predominantly male team at I-COM asked 3 women a series of questions, in an attempt to discover not only whether good SEO = sexiness, but also whether male SEO consultants and copywriters are, by default, more attractive than their counterparts, who have chosen to practice less sexy professions. The results were encouraging: Our study found that 100% of the women we asked in the I-COM office believed that a well SEO'd site was an indication that the business owner was a sculpted Adonis. We also discovered that 66.67% of the women included in the study would definitely get in touch with the owner of a business with a well SEO'd site and arrange for a date that very evening, whilst the other 33.33% would leave it 24 hours before deciding. When asked about the attractiveness of SEO Consultants, 100% of women said that discovering a man was an SEO Consultant or copywriter would make them "hot under the collar", and that they believed he would definitely be "more of a gentleman". So men, could you really need any more evidence that your business needs SEO, or that you should definitely quit that job as a solicitor and come work for I-COM? Sorry women, we're not sure it works for you. Do your own study! Search Engine Optimisation 2010-04-21 13:53:00 http://www.i-com.net/blog/seo-is-sexy-its-a-fact-341/ http://www.i-com.net/blog/what-recession-there-is-a-home-for-arts-graduates-internet-marketing-213/ When out with a large group of friends and relatives recently, I found myself sat opposite a friend of the family who owns a business. The business is relatively small, and according to my vague understanding has something to do with marketing. Anyway, we got to talking and, as a recent graduate myself, I inquired as to his thoughts on the age-old Degree vs. Experience debate, those two dark monoliths of the employment market. Youll forgive me for paraphrasing his response, wine has somewhat muddied my memory, but it went something like Oh degrees, yeah theyre relatively low on my list of priorities to be honest. What Im looking for is someone who has a proven track record in the job, good experience, and someone whos going to fit into the team. As a recent addition to the I-COM team, Im not long out of the employment market myself and am well aware of the pervasiveness of the must have at least one years relevant experience job advert addendum how it used to upset me, sitting at home endlessly browsing Monster for something, please something that was relevant to my degree subject (English Literature and Creative Writing). Ever the glutton for punishment, like a limpet I clung to the idea of Copywriting, the Holy Grail, yet time and time again my lack of experience was holding me back, but how could I get experience if no-one would give me a job without experience? Did no-one care about my three years of toil at university? Is it Worthless Though? If you ask me (and you havent, but Ill tell you anyway), its not; not at all. Its just that were entering the whole university experience with a muddied perception of what well have at the end. Unfortunately, an arts degree, or any kind of degree, is not an automatic pass into the employment market. There is an increasingly prominent idea that University constitutes some sort of step in a career ladder, and the institutions themselves are encouraging it. Universities nowadays advertise themselves on their statistics; how many people have gone into full-time employment, what jobs are they in, how much are they earning? Now, if youre there for a Medical or a Law degree, this is no doubt true. In fact Law graduates can expect to earn between 24% and 30% more than people who left school immediately after A Levels. But is it really true of an Arts degree? Of course not. If you choose Arts, youre choosing philosophy, history, literature; youre choosing a path of intellectual inquisition and acquisition. What youre not doing, is getting your foot in the door, climbing a rung in the ladder or particularly impressing your future employers, which is why so many arts graduates turn to teaching. Studying the Arts at university is almost the direct antithesis of the business world, which is why all those Arts graduates are sitting around twiddling their thumbs after graduation saying What now?, whilst all their ultra-organised marketing and business studies contemporaries are already eating at the captains table and applying for The Apprentice. All Change Now every man, woman and his/her dog goes to uni (has this popular saying suffered from the PC treatment?), theyve had to diversify, which is no bad thing. Surely theres no-one pining for the good old days when women werent allowed and foppish, upper class men lounged on the lawn musing aimlessly (well, maybe...). The Arts has been left behind, and all the proper jobs are for business, science and engineering graduates, unless youre willing to do a post degree conversion in accountancy, law or some other vocational subject. But dont listen to those miserable types you know the ones, moaning about all the debt theyve accrued during their university careers, desperately trying to rain on everyone elses parade as a salve for their own inadequacies. There are homes for arts graduates in business, and there are Arts-based opportunities for the chosen few with the killer combination of drive, ambition and creativity (If only...). As long as youre not the kind of person who gauges success by how much money you earn (or owe), you can feel good about your Arts degree; perhaps you even want to be a teacher. Dont Get Lost in Translation Arts degrees are chock full of translatable skills research skills, writing abilities, creative thinking and the general worldliness that comes with knowing a little bit more than your peers about where weve come from, not to mention the fact that youve stuck with something for three years, met deadlines and come out with a recognisable grade at the end. We know the papers are doom and gloom, just look at the swine flu debacle; they may as well report on the common cold. Its therefore inevitable that they will also report on the grave state of affairs in the UK jobs market, not to mention the state of graduate employment, as its a fantastic way of having a dig at a Labour government who encouraged more and more teenagers to consider university. What Im saying is, pay them no mind. Yes things are bad at the moment, but the internet is a limitless resource, constantly expanding, and the freedom it allows also allows for economic capitalisation and consistent business expansion. Arts degrees can be easily translated into the world of internet marketing, copywriting and web design choosing the right words to perfectly describe a clients product, targeting your copy to appeal to a particular audience, researching keywords that will ensure your website is found by the right people, designing a website that looks fantastic and is easy to use   Dont get lost in translation, steer clear of those graduate sales adverts and hold out (if you can) for a job that will utilise the skills youve acquired. Its done; you cant go back so you may as well go forward, and moaning about student debt, which is relatively small and friendly in real-world terms, wont help. Wear that BA with pride, re-draft your CV and get yourself back on Recruitment.com, Monster, Jobsite, Prospects, etc. You know the drill. I-COM News 2009-07-03 11:28:47 http://www.i-com.net/blog/what-recession-there-is-a-home-for-arts-graduates-internet-marketing-213/ http://www.i-com.net/blog/the-three-most-annoying-things-for-an-seo-company-180/ Three things that really get my goat day-to-day as we try to run a SEO business. In no particular order they are: Recruitment Companies - we must take at least 15 calls a day from agents looking to provide us with staff. We're fortunate enough to be growing but they should learn that the way the market is at the moment we don't need to employ recruitment agencies. We see new CV's everyday and can avoid paying their often exorbitant fees. Indian SEO Outsourcing Firms - again we receive probably 4 or 5 emails a day from Indian firms looking to acquire outsourced work. We've tried it and it doesn't work. What makes me most angry are the unsolicited emails from other substandard SEO Agencies that think by running a simple script they can win our business - they don't even stop to consider that as an SEO business we really don't need to employ another agency. Perhaps the spam database they've bought doesn't provide enough information to tell them who they're emailing? We've just had one today from a company up in Lancaster. This "senior search consultant" expects me to employ him because we "don't appear on the first page of Google" (he doesn't say what for even though we have lots of first place listings) and he can help me "blow my online revenue off the charts". He knows he can do this because, according to the writer, our page rank is only 5/10, we only have 401 pages indexed in Google and we only have 295 inbound links indexed by Google.  OK, at least they have taken the time to find some information out about our website - even if they haven't looked at the website itself, but not only is their information only partially correct (a PageRank of 5 is pretty good, we have more than 401 indexed pages and we have many more than 295 inbound links) but they haven't looked at the quality of our meagre 400+ pages, the authority of those inbound links and they have no information about the keywords sending us traffic, how we rank for those keywords and whether those visitors convert into sales. Ultimately, though, the inaccurate and meaningless statistics they have spewed at us in their email and the obvious mistakes they've made in targeting another SEO firm to offer their SEO services to reveal the real difference between his SEO business and ours. They are not interested in the company behind the listings - or they'd have checked out our website more thoroughly. They're not concerned about building quality relationships with quality businesses and helping those businesses improve their online offering - they're interested in getting as many responses as quickly as possible from whoever will listen. Their backlinks reveal a mess of sites with keyword stuffed title tags and little attention paid to the usability of the sites and their ability to convert visitors into sales. Their work is clearly about rankings achieved through whatever means possible. On the other hand, our work is about providing a service. That service isn't just about rankings - it's about quality. It's about building strong relationships with our customers so that we understand their businesses and their goals and how we can help them achieve those goals. We do more than just improve listings in Google, we help companies improve their brand reputation, their brand recognition and the service they offer - and we feel proud when we see our clients' businesses grow because they are the most important part of our business. Sadly, many businesses still don't know enough about SEO to tell the difference between seo companies. They see an email with a bunch of technical drivel and they start to worry, and if the service is cheap enough and the SEO agency promises a high enough ROI  they'll hand over their money - only to be disappointed when they don't come close to achieving that ROI. What this boils down to is that we really need some form of Quality Standard for our industry to prevent businesses outside of our industry losing money on hiring experts who are not really experts at all. Search Engine Optimisation 2009-04-09 09:56:00 http://www.i-com.net/blog/the-three-most-annoying-things-for-an-seo-company-180/ http://www.i-com.net/blog/junior-staff-required-online-copywriters-developers-and-it-specialists-166/ I-COM believe in personal development, we like to give people responsibility for their own accounts as quickly as possible. Touch wood, this seems to work because not many people leave the business once they're here. We're now ready to expand the business again and we're looking for some fresh talent to come in at the ground level. There are three posts we're keen to fill: Online Copywriter - this person will work closely with the SEO team here at I-COM and will learn how to write copy for the web that is not only found by search engines but captures the visitor's imagination and encourages conversions. A bit of previous experience copywriting would be nice but what's most important is a good writing style and a good standard of written English. Junior Developer - if you know your way round PHP and can show us some of your work we'd love to hear from you. You could be fresh out of college - we don't require commercial experience just technical competence and a desire to deliver great solutions for our clients. Junior IT Specialist - if you're interested in IT and know your way around Linux then this could be the job for you. Our business is growing and our internal IT infrastructure is evolving, we need someone who can initially work with our Technical Director to begin to sort out our IT and develop a strategy going forward. This is a role that will grow with you. If you're interested in any of these vacancies please send us an email to careers@i-com.net along with your CV. If you're interested in either the copywriter and developer positions it would be good to see some examples of your work. We look forward to hearing from you. I-COM News 2009-03-04 16:08:08 http://www.i-com.net/blog/junior-staff-required-online-copywriters-developers-and-it-specialists-166/ http://www.i-com.net/blog/seo-jobs-and-web-development-jobs-in-manchester-108/ At I-COM were busy and as we expand our client roster were also looking to expand the team at our Manchester city centre offices. At the moment we have a number of SEO and Web Development vacancies: SEO Consultants Were looking for experienced SEO consultants who can manage the implementation and ongoing SEO for a number of clients. Youll need to be have some knowledge of the full range of SEO tasks including keyword research, SEO copywriting, site reviews/code analysis, analytics and link building. You will be comfortable working in a client-facing role and have some experience of working with HTML and CSS. Junior SEO Consultants If youre new to SEO or looking to learn, were also looking for junior SEO consultants who know their way around the internet to help our SEO team on a range of tasks from copywriting, to tagging to link building. Some knowledge of HTML and CSS would be beneficial. Copywriters We also need in house copywriters to work closely with the SEO team on site content for a wide range of clients as well as blogging, online PR and article submission. While some knowledge of SEO would be helpful, you need to be a good writer who knows how to write catchy copy and has a pedants eye for grammar and syntax. Junior Web Developer We are looking for a junior developer who has some experience of CSS, HTML, XHTML, ASP, PHP, MYSQL, SQL Server to work within the SEO team. Some experience of search engine optimisation would be helpful. Project Manager We are looking for a web developer with experience of PHP, ASP, and ideally XHTML and CSS who wants to work more closely with clients. 60% of the work will be hands on development with remaining 40% spent working with clients and managing projects. Interaction will be with a team of 9 designers/developers and programmers. For more information or to apply, email us at careers@i-com.net. No agencies, please. I-COM News 2008-10-14 16:29:01 http://www.i-com.net/blog/seo-jobs-and-web-development-jobs-in-manchester-108/